


The Way Forward

by Bullfinch



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Trespasser Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 14:43:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4839305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bullfinch/pseuds/Bullfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contains Trespasser spoilers. After speaking to Solas, the Inquisitor must make a painful decision. Full summary inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way Forward

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the DA kinkmeme, seen [here.](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/15543.html?thread=58282679#t58282679) In brief: Solas tells Evelyn Trevelyan that the Anchor is killing her but leaves her arm intact. She must solve the problem herself.

Evelyn hurts very much.

She wishes she didn’t. Then maybe she would be able to stand up, and he might be more inclined to listen to her. As it is, she kneels on the ground, bent in half, cradling her marked hand as if it’s a squalling child that requires soothing. “Solas,  _please!”_ she begs, one more time. “Just—stop for a moment, and talk to me!”

“I know what it is you want, and what you will say. I fear it will not change my decision.”

He is crouched in front of her. A concession to her pain, which he dulled earlier, although it has broken through that silken numbness and now tears at her with eagerness. Odd, she thinks wildly, her mind scattered by agony, to see the Dread Wolf Fen’Harel, the mad trickster of legend, here before her, a small, thin man crouched low to the ground. “We were  _friends!”_  she screams out. Childish, perhaps, but she hurts very much and the scream is all she has. “I know you, Solas, I cared about you!  _We were friends!”_

He rises, a small, thin man, and looms above her, and she feels as though she is in the shadow of one of the great black gate guardians they saw together in the Hissing Wastes, when she stared up breathless and a little afraid, and he seemed only unimpressed—annoyed, even. “Yes,” he admits. “We were. You—became very dear to me.”

“Then why won’t you talk to me?” She is sobbing now and angry at herself for it. She has the sense there is very little time left—time for what, she isn’t sure, but sobbing only wastes what precious moments remain.

He is quiet for a moment. The silence presses close to her, broken only by her own noisy crying, her noisy, undignified crying.

“You should go.” She watches his bare feet turn and retreat across the grass. “You have…some hours left. There is time for you to return to Halamshiral and…say your goodbyes.”

So she is going to die. Not that she ever doubted it—the Anchor wants her, avidly, even more so now that is so close to taking her life. “Can’t you—“ She holds her marked hand up to him like a tithe. “Can’t you do something about this? Can’t you help me? Solas?”

He gazes down at her with—fear? Is that fear? No. Remorse. Bloody useless remorse. “I am sorry,” he says.

“You can, can’t you?” Her breath seizes in her chest, but she breaks the hard catching, her anger too great to stay contained. “You _can_  help me, and you won’t!”

“Yes. That is true.” He stands there, he and his ancient contrition, and watches her dying. “This is who I must be. I am sorry,” he says again. “Inquisitor…. Evelyn.”

The green magic wraps up her forearm and squeezes it, as if a giant had her in its grip, and she screams again. But he is her friend, despite all evidence to the contrary, and she tries to speak, although it comes out as not much more than a choked whisper. “You don’t have to do this, Solas. You don’t have to destroy all of this. Everything we gave our blood to save. You must believe me.”

She sees his feet stutter, as if he wishes to come closer, to crouch beside her as he did before. But he stays where he is, the light of the eluvian glimmering over the grass behind him. “I would treasure the chance to be wrong once again, my friend.”

The green light blazes, and she fights it, sobs against it. She thinks she hears something, maybe, from the mirror that ripples before her with Solas’s passage. 

_Goodbye._

The mark calms. The reprieve will not last, she has learned that much. So she rises, unsteady, and lurches back the way she came. There are things the others must know.

——

They’re gathered there when Evelyn walks out of the mirror. Her head feels heavy, a wind-shaped stone balanced on the delicate spindle of her neck.

“Inquisitor!” Cassandra grasps her gently, one hand on her shoulder, the other at her back. “Are you all right?”

 _No._  “For now, yes.”

Varric’s gazing into the shining eluvian. “What happened in there?”

What happened? How to explain it? How much is the truth, and how much is her anger?

“Solas is Fen'Harel,” she tells them. That much, at least, is true.

Cassandra stares, disbelieving. “What?”

Because Cassandra often traveled with them, and Varric as well, the four of them together killing demons or red templars or Venatori or simply the wild animals that were offended by their presence. Both now wait, likely bursting with questions, but they’ve seen how worn she is, how weighed-down beneath the burden of this hungry mark, and they do not press her. Dorian hovers behind them. He never grew very close to Solas.  _There’s something…dangerous about that man,_  Evelyn once heard him say. And it seems he was right, and saw from afar what she should have seen right in front of her face.

If she stays in this place any longer she’s afraid her heavy head will topple to the ground and crack open like the Dread Wolf’s orb after Corypheus’s death. “We should go back to the Winter Palace, I’ll explain everything there. Only…” Her hand sears her, and she holds it close to her chest. “I might need some help getting there. The Anchor, it’s…it hurts. Very much.”

Varric offers her a grin, and makes a good effort at concealing his nervousness. “Course we’ll get you back. If we show up without you, Curly’ll have our heads.”

Cullen. She’s been suppressing her tears, unwilling to become in front of her friends the blubbering mess she was for Solas, but they well again now, so she blinks quickly and trudges forward, lest they notice how her eyes shine. “Good. Thank you, all of you. For coming with me. I know you weren’t expecting to…”

She keeps talking but loses track of what words are coming out of her. Her body flushes with pins and needles, from her toes all the way up to her cheeks, and two vast walls of indistinct blackness wrap around her, rushing to meet in the middle…

_“Inquisitor!”_

Cassandra’s face is above her. Evelyn blinks, confused.

The next she knows she is being carried.

On Cassandra’s back, from the metal armor shifting against her stomach. She notices that to her right, Dorian’s taken custody of the shield, and she smiles at the image.

Dorian looks up. “Evelyn! You’re awake!”

She nods at him. “Didn’t know you could use one of those.”

He glances over his shoulder. “Oh, I’ve had some training. Although my skill is likely somewhat lacking. Not to mention rusty. Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”

By this point Evelyn has realized that it was the pain that woke her, and she has the urge to moan, or to shed yet more tears. But she does neither of these things. Instead she feels her face tauten into a stony set. There will not be any more tears. Not for herself, and not for Solas. “Cassandra,” she says quietly. “You can let me walk on my own.”

The Anchor isn’t gathering energy at such an unmanageable pace anymore, and the excess is not discharged in a bright, sulfurous bloom of power, but instead seeps into her as poison into earth. When she exhales her breath is acid at the back of her throat. She feels sick, nauseous, and not only from the pain. Did Solas do that too? Did he corral the energy inward, to spare her companions? Was he delaying her death, or simply ensuring she would be able to return to the Winter Palace, to bid farewell to those she cares about? She thinks about Solas as she walks, about the silver-blue flash of his eyes, like a sword hastily drawn on an impulse of violence. She is thinking about him when the pain opens its jaws and eats into her and she faints again.

_“Evie!”_

That voice is familiar.

“Evie, please, Maker, please wake up—“

That voice. Evie. Cullen calls her that. Cullen.

She opens her eyes, props herself up on an elbow, and kisses him.

A generalized murmur of relief. It appears they’re not alone. She breaks off and looks around her. They’re in her quarters at the Winter Palace, she on the bed, the small room packed with her closest companions all crushed in to each other (one of the Iron Bull’s horns has the miniature chandelier at a slight cant). And Cullen is kneeling beside her, his relief having not quite defeated the fear still lingering on his face.

The mark hurts. It hurts. It  _hurts._

She clears her throat. “I found out what’s been happening here.”

The recounting is steadier than she’d expected. Most of it she spends clutching Cullen’s hand (he sits beside her now), squeezing it perhaps a little too tight when the Anchor issues another swell of pain. But she does not cry. Her voice hardly wavers. She puts in all the details she can think of—what Solas told her of the past, how it fits together with what other scraps they learned in the library. His decision, the world he wishes to summon again. When she finishes they are silent, which is…strange. She’d expected a barrage of questions. But they seem instead to be waiting. “What is it?” she asks. “What’s wrong?”

Cassandra stands closest, and must have been the one to carry Evelyn to the bed in the first place. “You—you didn’t tell us what he said about your mark. He must have told you something.”

Yes. The mark. Her palm crackles, and she flinches with the sudden sting of pain. “He said it will kill me. Very soon.”

“What? How soon?” Cullen asks, urgent.

His hand is warm, and calloused—despite his position of leadership, he still trains with the rest of his soldiers. She doesn’t want to tell him this, but she must. Must get it all over with. “He said I have only a few hours.”

_“What?”_

Now they lob questions at her— _did he say how to stop it? Why didn’t he take it away himself?_  She raises her voice to talk over them. “Please! I know what he said, but I’m not going to let this thing kill me.” She raises her hand, her treacherous hand. Her face is hard, as it was earlier, when she was being borne on Cassandra’s back. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. Her years as Inquisitor have changed her, yes, but she still smiles often, still thinks of herself as compassionate, sensitive, even. But the tightness around her mouth, the weight that lids her eyes—a compassionate woman would not have a face like this.

Yet she still wants to save him. She still wants to save him.

“I’m not going to let the mark kill me,” she says. “Because I’m going to cut it off.”

A stunned silence. Then Iron Bull asks what she’s been thinking herself— “Will that—work?”

She shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. But it’s better than doing nothing.” A faintly hysterical grin splits her lips. “Oh, Cullen, you marry me and the first thing I go and do is hack off one of my limbs, sorry you got stuck with a one-armed wife—“

 _“Evie!”_  He holds her face, looks her in the eye. “You will always be beautiful to me.  _Always._  No matter what.”

His rough skin on her cheek is unbearably comforting and she wishes he would hold her forever. “Even when I’m old and grey and all wrinkled up like a prune?” she asks, teasing, even though it hurts, it  _hurts—_

 _If I live that long,_ she thinks.

“Yes. Even then.” He smiles at her. “Although I expect I’ll be mostly wrinkles by that point too.”

“And I’ll still love you.” She kisses him, but it is brief because she has work to do. “All right, I need to get this thing off. Bull, will you do the honors?”

“Uh—look, you know me, boss, I’m up for anything—“ He raises one eyebrow at her from beneath the tilted chandelier. “—but I’m thinking a surgeon might do a better job.”

She stares for a second, then bursts out with a high laugh wholly inappropriate for a situation of this gravity. What with the terror and the drama surrounding the Qunari plot, and the mark’s slow advance, and Solas’s awful betrayal—she’d gotten swept up in it all. “I forgot. Yes, a surgeon. That’s a better idea.”

Cullen comes with her, and they find a storeroom in the depths of the palace, buried, where the thick stone walls will block her screaming from all the ambassadors and dignitaries and emissaries and whatever other titles await her decision. Better they not know how she twisted and sobbed. Perhaps if she shows up again with half an arm missing and a smile on her face, they’ll think she sat stoic through it, laughed it off when it was done, cracked a joke or two with the surgeon as the bone saw was biting through her forearm.

None of which will happen, of course. She fights on the front lines but her magic always protects her, and pain is still unusual, an interrupt in the proceedings. (Not like it is for Cassandra, who always seems pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t get terribly injured during the course of an outing.) There will be screaming. Oh yes. She hopes Cullen won’t think less of her for it.

The heavy oak dining table in the middle of the room is missing half a leg ( _sort of like me in an hour or two,_  she thinks) but Cullen props it up with a sturdy crate. Evelyn lies down, rolls up her sleeve, and lays out her traitorous arm. The surgeon is Inquisition, a gruff woman whose no-nonsense attitude suits her profession well—Aldis, that was her name, Graeve Aldis. She frowns at the arm for a moment, then streaks Evelyn’s skin with a bit of charcoal. “We’ll take it off just below there, that all right?” she asks, her words arched with a thick Starkhaven accent.

Evelyn can’t bear to look, so she just nods and says “Fine.”

“Good.” The woman holds out a flask. “Now drink this. Should put you out for a while.”

“No,” Evelyn says sharply. “I don’t want to go to sleep.”

Aldis fixes her with a skeptical eye. “You may want to rethink that, Inquisitor.”

“I’ve thought about it plenty. If this doesn’t work—if I’m still going to die—then I want to spend my last hours here, awake. No matter how much it hurts.” She squeezes Cullen’s hand. He sits beside her, honest and fair and very worried.

Aldis heaves a weary sigh and fishes out a second flask. “Do as you like. This one won’t put you to sleep, but it’ll make the whole process more bearable. And if you’re going to be awake and writhing, then the commander will have to pin your arm down for me.”

“No, I—I need him,” Evelyn whispers.

The surgeon grunts. “Fine. Then I’ll be back.”

That’s another few minutes’ delay while she goes to find more supplies (not more people to help—Evelyn doesn’t want anyone else to witness this, not even her companions, not even Cullen, truth be told, but she couldn’t endure it without him). The wait only makes Evelyn more nervous, although the vile-tasting concoction in the flask dulls the nervousness as well as the pain. Cullen talks to her, not of Solas or the upcoming amputation, but of more mundane things, of what ridiculous Orlesian styles have popped up since they were last here, of which noble has tried most recently to grab his arse. That calms her too.

Then Aldis is back with three belts, a hammer, and a handful of nails.

One belt below the amputation site, and one above. The third just below her shoulder. Aldis hammers them into the table with precision. When she is finished Evelyn can’t move her arm at all. As if her vicious mark is finally caged. Good.

“That flask do anything for you?”

Evelyn nods.

“Then I’ll get started. Try not to tense up.”

The first cut is small, shallow, not much worse than a bee-sting. Then it goes deeper, and her muscles tighten but she forces herself to relax, so as not to make the operation more difficult. “Cullen, talk to me,” she pleads.

So he does, and she knows,  _knows_  he’s afraid, but she’s damned if she can hear it in his voice, or see it whenever she gathers the strength to turn her head and look at his face. He holds her hand in both of his own, and that is the only betrayal, the slight trembling against her skin. He talks about his family in Ferelden, how excited he is to introduce her to them. He talks about their new Mabari, and posits a few names (all a tad boring, but Evelyn withholds her criticism). He talks about how unbelievable it is Varric’s a viscount now, and how at ease Leliana seems on the Sunburst Throne, and how good it was to see Dorian again.

The mark hurts. The cutting hurts. Hurts. Hurts. Hurts.

Evelyn cries, as she knew she would, and now and then an embarrassing squeal of pain wrenches out of her throat. Her cheeks burn with shame. Cullen’s hands tighten around hers, and she gives him a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sorry to put you through this,” she tells him, sniffling as she assembles a shaky smile. “Bit cruel of me, isn’t it? I should have sent you away.”  _But I wanted you here, should these be my last moments, stuck in a storeroom with my arm being hacked off, at least I have you—_

He kisses her fingers. “There’s nothing in this world that could convince me to leave your side.”

“I  _am_  a mage,” she reminds him. “I could conjure up a wall of ice. That might ‘convince’ you, whether you liked it or not.”

“I know a couple of mages myself,” he counters. “Whom I’m sure would help me break through. They know you don’t deserve to bear this alone.”

 _I don’t deserve to bear this at all, only Solas thought I did._  But she doesn’t say that because something pinches in her arm, and an agonized whine keens out of her instead. She twists her head to look. Some bright instrument is stuck in the gory cut, and the handles lie to one side. “Clamped the vessel shut,” Aldis says. “Shouldn’t bleed so much.”

“I suppose Bull and his axe couldn’t do that,” Evelyn mutters.

Then the cutting begins again, only now the mark surges with it, and she keeps her arm relaxed but the rest of her body tenses, her back arching up off the table, her heels digging into the wood. For a moment the scream holds in her throat, a taut bubble of sound limned with disbelief—how could it hurt this much? How could anything hurt this much?

Then it bursts, and she screams.

The pain washes through her, makes out of her body an empty vessel that must be filled, that can only be filled, with pain. A blessing, she thinks, for some bizarre reason, because she can no longer feel the surgeon’s silver instruments removing one of her limbs. Instead the sensation is replaced by the acid-hot burning of the Anchor. With a sick jolt she discovers that she isn’t holding Cullen’s hand anymore, and she gropes wildly, terrified. “Cullen—Cullen, where are you—“

“I’m here, Evie. I’m right here.”

She realizes then that they  _are_  still holding hands, but she couldn’t feel that either. She does now, his calloused palms against her, as the agony winds down.

Once more, as she did in that small grassy clearing, with Solas before her, she has the sense that there is very little time left.

“What could I have said?” she whispers. “What did I do wrong? What did I  _not_  say that could have turned him from that path?”

“You did all you could.” Cullen’s voice trembles now, right beside her. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“He wouldn’t even listen to me.” She grins, hiccups out a laugh. “Why would he? He’s an ancient elven god-mage. I’m only a regular person.”

“Now I wouldn’t say that.” Cullen smiles, she sees it, barely, through the blur of tears. “I think you’re a rather remarkable person. Although I must admit I may be  _slightly_  biased.”

Then his eyes flick up, so hers do too. Aldis is drawing something from her bag. 

A bone saw.

“This is going to hurt,” she tells Evelyn.

The mere sight of the instrument makes Evelyn feel faint, although that might just be the pain sucking at her. She’s going to lose her arm for good.

She squeezes Cullen’s hand. “I love you.”

He leans down and kisses her—with tenderness, but also an ardor that draws her in and shelters her for a moment from the vicious green burning. When he pulls back she misses it desperately. “I love you too,” he says.

Aldis waits, the shining saw poised over the bloody cut. Evelyn nods at her.

The sharp little teeth grind into her bone. She screams—why not? she’s already embarrassed herself plenty—and screams louder, her body bucking in protest. Why should it hurt so much? What did she do to bring this awful punishment down on herself?

But the storm of questions abruptly falls away, as does the storeroom, as do Aldis and the grim twist of her lips, as do Cullen’s hand and the saw digging into her arm. The blackness swarms around her, and she gives herself to it with a wretched relief. In the dark she thinks she hears something, far away.

_Inquisitor…. Evelyn._

_My friend._

_Goodbye._

——

Upon waking she finds her mouth is dry. Very dry, her tongue stuck to the roof of it. She squints (bright, something is bright) and makes a face.

“Inquisitor!”

Oh.

Evelyn goes to rub her eyes, only her hand never actually gets there. Confused, she tries with her other hand. That works, at least.

“Inquisitor, how do you feel?” Cassandra sits forward in her chair.

Evelyn frowns with her dry, dry mouth. She’s still confused, and can’t remember what’s happened to her or where she is, nor why one of her hands isn’t working. She raises it…

…to find only a bandaged stump.

She stares for a moment, then blurts out, “It’s gone!”

“Uh—yeah.” That’s Varric, sitting beside Cassandra. “You had a surgeon take it off, remember?”

“No, not the hand—well, yes, the hand. But the mark, it’s gone! I don’t feel it in me anymore!” And she doesn’t—no more burning, she can hardly believe it, the blasted thing is gone—

But of course she still must hurt. The deep ache at the end of her amputated arm reaches her then, a dull but intense throb that goes straight to her stomach and makes her sick. “Ow,” she whispers, and holds the arm to her chest.

Someone strokes her face—Cullen, and tears spring to her eyes at the sight of him (damn it all, she wishes she would stop crying one of these days), because she is free of the mark and she is married now and she is going to live. “Is there any water?” she asks.

So he helps her sit up, his palm at her back, and she grasps his hand to push herself upright. The ache is bad, yes, and makes her stomach knot, but compared to the way the mark seared her entire being it’s a relief. Cassandra hands her a cup of water, which she sips at, cautious of her fragile state. “All right,” she says breathlessly. “What time is it?”

“Past midday, I believe,” Cassandra replies.

“Good. Call the Exalted Council. I’m ready to finish this.”

None of them like that idea very much—she hears three different variations of ‘you need to rest,’ but she waves them off with her half an arm. “I’ve been asleep since last evening, I’ve rested plenty. And anyway, I’ve got more important things to do than spend even  _more_  time arguing with old men who don’t want to listen to me.”

Cassandra folds her arms and sits back. “You want to go after Solas.”

“Yes. I do.” Evelyn feels her face tightening again, the same stony set that was so unfamiliar before. She’s starting to grow accustomed to it. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it—I haven’t the faintest idea where even to start, honestly. But I’m going to find him again. I’m going to convince him to stop what he’s doing. I know I can’t—“ Her hand lies open on her lap. Her one remaining hand. “I can’t ask any of you to help me with that. You’ve all already given so much. But I think—it’ll be hard by myself.”

Cassandra snorts. “You’ll have me, certainly. I’ve got some questions of my own I’d like to ask him.”

“I know I’m a viscount now, and I’ve been told that comes with a lot of, you know, obligations, and responsibilities, and other such unpleasant words. But let’s be honest, a manhunt—elf-hunt, I guess—sounds a whole lot more fun.” Varric grins. “One nice thing about this whole viscount business, it sure opens up doors.”

“As for me—well, I’ll be there anyway,” Cullen says, a half-smile curling his scarred lip. “I suppose I might as well lend a hand.”

Evelyn puts on her most wounded expression and clutches her stump. Cullen’s face folds, horrified. “No—Evie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—“

But she can’t sustain it, and she bursts out laughing, an undignified cackle that’s echoed by Cassandra’s chuckling and Varric’s deep guffaws. Cullen slumps back with a defeated grin, so she leans over and kisses him. “Give me a few days to get this pain under control,” she tells him. “Then I’ll be the one making terrible jokes.”

She shouldn’t have mentioned the pain. His grin slips, and he grasps her shoulder. “How badly does it hurt? Do you need something more for it?”

Much as she’s loath to admit it… “That might be best. It wouldn’t do to be moaning and wincing in front of the Council. Now will you help me wash up and get dressed? I need to look intimidating.”

“I think the missing hand will help a lot with that, actually.” Varric rises. “I’ll see you at the big meeting. And Evelyn…I’m glad you’re gonna stay with us.”

She smiles at him. “Me too.”

Then he leaves, Cassandra behind him. She stands, wavering only a little, and Cullen helps her peel off her clothes. They step into the washroom, and she raises her amputated arm so the bandages won’t get wet as he washes her. When they’re finished she chooses her outfit—close-fitting and dark, unornamented.

Solas’s words come to her again.  _This is who I must be._

 _Is that so?_  she thinks, gazing at herself in the mirror, the pinned sleeve skewing her silhouette, as a piece carved out. Her expression, though she had not noticed it, is grim—her eyes narrow, mouth thin.

_Then this is who I must be._

“Inquisitor?”

Cullen holds the door open. She takes a deep breath and walks through.


End file.
